Peer communication. Friendship

The most important environment for development in adolescence is peer society.

Firstly, communication with peers is a very important specific channel of information; through it, adolescents and young men learn many necessary things that, for one reason or another, adults do not tell them, for example, the vast majority of information on the issue of sex.

Secondly, this is a specific type of activity and interpersonal relations, where the necessary skills of social interaction are developed, the ability to obey collective discipline and at the same time defend one's rights, correlate personal interests with public ones. The competitiveness of group relationships, especially strong in boys, serves as a valuable life school. In the words of the French writer A. Morois, school mates are better educators than parents, because they are ruthless.

Thirdly, it is a specific kind of emotional contact. Consciousness of group belonging, solidarity, comradely mutual assistance not only facilitates the adolescent's autonomy from adults, but also gives him an extremely important sense of emotional well-being and stability. Whether he managed to earn the respect and love of equals, comrades, is of decisive importance for youthful self-respect.

The growing influence of peers is manifested primarily in the fact that they spend most of their time with peers. The norms and criteria adopted in the circle of peers become in some respects psychologically more significant than those that exist among the elders.

"Society of peers", within the framework and under the influence of which the personality of a high school student is formed, exists in two qualitatively various forms: 1) in the form of organized and directly or indirectly directed by adults collectives and 2) in the form of more or less spontaneously formed communication groups, friendly companies, etc. Their composition, structure and functions are significantly different.

In principle, the most important group for a young man is his school class, educational or production team. The position in the team has a decisive influence on the moral well-being and behavior of the adolescent. But many youth groups and organizations in our country are too “overorganized” and are excessively patronized and controlled by adults, and their affairs are much lower than the level and capabilities of the children. Hence the enormous role of informal communication, street, courtyard and other informal groups and companies. Communities of this kind exist everywhere and everywhere. As a rule, they are of different ages, and their role in the lives of adolescents, especially boys, is enormous. Trying to destroy them is almost useless. However, these companies are very different. Some are engaged in useful social activities, cemented by common cultural interests. Others are based on common hobbies, for example, amateur song, rock music, etc. Still others are clearly or potentially anti-social, the guys in them are involved in drunkenness, drug addiction, hooliganism, etc. Juvenile delinquency, as a rule, is group .

The lack of control of youthful communication, of course, worries the elders. However, many teachers and parents do not take the trouble to understand the essence of teenage hobbies, preferring their indiscriminate condemnation and prohibition (for the most part, obviously not effective). Such intolerance often produces the exact opposite result.

Well, as for not only the specific guys with whom our children are friends and communicate, but also the youth subculture itself, including youth fashion, language, hairstyles, music, etc., much of what teenagers are fond of evokes in older brought up in a different environment, a sense of protest and condemnation. But we must remember that conflicts of this kind have always existed.

different forms and places of communication not only replace each other, but also coexist, responding to different psychological needs. The young man longs for new acquaintances, adventures, experiences. Unconscious inner anxiety drives him away from home, from the familiar, settled atmosphere. This is the expectation of something new, unexpected - right now, around the next turn, something significant should happen: an interesting meeting, an important acquaintance ... For the most part, these expectations do not come true - you also need to be able to organize an adventure, and yet the next evening, the legs themselves carry to where people are.

Teenagers and young men really want to be modern. But "modernity" is often understood as the sum of external signs, blind adherence to the momentary fashion. Many youthful hobbies and fads are short-lived, designed for external effect and, new in form, rather trivial in content. It is difficult for adults to understand how intelligent, intelligent high school students can attach such importance to the cut of trousers, the length of hair, or write letters of protest to the editors of a newspaper that printed a critical note about the manner of performance of their favorite singer. But these fashions and quirks should not be considered in isolation, but in the socio-psychological context of youthful perception.

In youthful hobbies, a sense of belonging, which is extremely important for a developing personality, is realized: in order to be completely one's own, one must both look like everyone else and share common hobbies. Fashion is a means of self-expression. It's not just the difference in tastes of fathers and children, but the fact that children want to be different from their elders, and the easiest way to do this is with the help of external accessories. The appearance of a person is nothing more than a means of communication, through which he informs the people around him about his status, level of claims, tastes, etc.

The “significant” function of youth fashion is perfectly shown in the novel by W. Plenzdorf (GDR) “The New Sufferings of Young V.”, whose hero Edgar Wibo composed a whole hymn to jeans, which occupies an important place in his life. Jeans are the most noble pants in the world! Edgar is simply offended when old people “cling” to them: “Jeans must be properly worn. And then they are stretched and they themselves do not understand what they have on their thighs. I can't stand it when some twenty-five-year-old bastard squeezes his hams into his jeans, and even tightens them around the waist. It's the finish line. Jeans - hip pants! This means that they must be narrow and hold on simply by friction ... At twenty-five years old, you can’t understand this anymore ... In general, jeans are the whole person, and not just pants.

This "denim philosophy" seems ridiculous, as does the emotional "drama" of a high school student who is almost dragged to the hairdresser by force. But the young man sees in jeans or long hair a certain symbol of his individuality. It is strange, of course, to affirm individuality by striving to look "like everyone else." Those who are smarter cannot fail to notice this contradiction.

“I often think, why are we “ours”, what do we have in common? the 16-year-old Muscovite asks himself. - We differ from others in our way of dressing, that is, we are not like “others”. We listen to the same discs, we express our delight or dislike with the same words, we say the same words to the girls ... "

The desire to somehow stand out, to attract attention is characteristic of people of any age. An adult, mature person does this imperceptibly, he uses both his social position and his labor achievements, education, cultural background, communication experience and much more. A young man who is just starting to live has much poorer social baggage, as well as the ability to use it. At the same time, when meeting new people, he is much more likely than an adult to find himself in the situation of “watching”. Hence - the special value of catchy external accessories - incorporeal images of rare beauty, which could only be admired.

And in the gymnasium, among many comrades, there were cynical conversations that roughly reduced all love to sexual intercourse.

The future writer kept silent, hid his love, but nevertheless "he listened attentively to jokes and obscene songs ..."

“I was corrupted in my soul, looked with lust at the beautiful women I met on the streets, thought with bated breath - what an unimaginable pleasure it would be to hug them, eagerly and shamelessly caress. But all this muddy spiritual stream rushed past the images of three beloved girls, and not a single splash fell on them from this stream. And the dirtier I felt in my soul, the purer and sublime was my feeling for them.

Youthful cynicism cannot but jar adults. But discussing taboo issues with peers allows you to remove the tension they cause and partly defuse it with laughter. In the "laughter culture" of adults there are also many sexual motives.

Therefore, the educator should worry not only about those who are "dirty talk", but also about those who silently listen. It is these guys who are not able to express and “ground” the vague experiences that excite them, sometimes turn out to be the most impressionable and vulnerable. What in others spills out in cynical words, in these is cast into deep-lying stable fantastic images. Along with boys who exaggerate the physical aspects of sexuality, there are also those who do their best to isolate themselves, to hide from them. Asceticism, an emphatically contemptuous and hostile attitude towards any sensuality that seems base and "dirty" to a teenager, can serve as psychological protection for them. The ideal of such a young man is not just the ability to control his feelings, but their complete suppression. Another typical youthful defensive attitude is "intellectualism": if the "ascetic" wants to get rid of sensuality, since it is "dirty", then the "intellectual" finds it "uninteresting".

The demands of moral purity and self-discipline are positive in themselves. But their hypertrophy entails artificial self-isolation from others, arrogance, intolerance, which are based on fear of life.

An important feature of adolescent and youthful sexuality is its "experimental" nature. Discovering his sexual abilities, a teenager explores them from different angles. At no other age is there such a large number of cases of deviant, close to pathological sexual behavior as at 12-15 years. Great knowledge and tact are required from adults to distinguish really disturbing symptoms that require qualified medical intervention from outwardly similar to them and nevertheless quite natural for this age forms of sexual “experimentation”, on which one should not fix attention in order to inadvertently do not inflict psychological trauma on a teenager by instilling in him the idea that “something is wrong” with him. If you are not sure that you really understand the essence of the matter and can help, you must strictly follow the first commandment of the old medical code: “Do no harm!”

For many years, teenagers and young men have been intimidated by the terrible consequences of masturbation (masturbation), which allegedly leads to impotence, memory impairment and even insanity. It is clear to medical scientists today that this is not true. In early adolescence, masturbation among boys is massive. Girls start masturbating later and do it less intensely.

As the well-known Leningrad sexologist Professor A. M. Svyadoshch writes, “moderate masturbation in adolescence usually has the character of self-regulation of sexual function. It helps to reduce increased sexual excitability and is harmless.

As for its psychological consequences, it is precisely the feelings of guilt and fear caused by intimidation that pose the greatest danger.

Trying to fight this “bad habit” (the mildest expression used by adults), the young man usually, like millions of people before him (but he does not know this), fails. This causes him to doubt the value of his own personality and especially strong-willed qualities, reduces self-esteem, encourages him to perceive difficulties and failures in study and communication as a consequence of his "vice".

With regard to adolescents and young men, it is not the fact of masturbation itself (since it is massive) and not even its intensity (since the individual “norm” is associated with the sexual constitution) that should be alarming, but only those cases when masturbation becomes obsessive, harmfully affecting well-being and high school student behavior. However, in these cases, for the most part, masturbation is not so much the cause of poor social adaptation as its symptom and consequence. This question is of fundamental importance for pedagogy. Previously, when masturbation was considered the cause of a teenager's lack of sociability, isolation, all efforts were directed to wean him from this habit. The results were usually negligible and even negative. Now they act differently. Instead of intimidating a teenager, they try to tactfully improve his communication skills, help him take an acceptable position in the society of his peers, and engage him in interesting collective work. As experience shows, this positive pedagogy is much more effective.

Along with genuine hobbies, there are a lot of invented things in the relationship between boys and girls. Courtship, the exchange of notes, the first date, the first kiss are important not only and not so much in themselves, as a response to the high school student's own inner need, but as certain social symbols, signs of growing up. Just as a younger teenager waits for the appearance of secondary sexual characteristics, so a young man waits for the time when he will finally fall in love. If this event is late (and there are no chronological norms here), he is nervous, sometimes he tries to replace a genuine hobby with an invented one, etc. Hence the constant looking back at the opinions of peers, imitation, boasting of real, and more often imaginary "victories", etc. Falling in love at this age often resembles an epidemic: as soon as one couple appears, everyone falls in love, and everything is calm in the next class. Objects of hobbies also often have a group character, since communication with a popular girl (or boy) in the class significantly increases one's own prestige among peers. Even intimacy is often a means of self-affirmation in the eyes of young men in the eyes of their peers.

The lower the age of young people at the time of their first sexual intercourse, the less morally motivated this relationship is, the less love it contains.

Most Soviet boys and girls consider entering into intimate relationships morally justified only if there is love. But not everyone thinks and acts like that. Some boys and girls start sexual life, while still schoolchildren, and without love or at least hobbies, they often change sexual partners, etc. Why is this practice bad?

Firstly, it contradicts the moral principles of our society, and this leaves in the minds of adolescents, even against their own will, a sense of guilt, remorse, or, on the contrary, a cynical attitude towards life and moral principles in general.

Secondly, "loveless sex" is emotionally, psychologically inferior, it quickly and easily depreciates, so that young people unwittingly rob themselves.

Thirdly, as a result of the low sexual culture of young men, ignorance of contraceptives, etc., early casual relationships often lead to unwanted pregnancies that have to be interrupted artificially, since 15-16-year-old parents are neither socially nor psychologically ready for marriage and upbringing of children. Fourthly, extensive sexual intercourse creates an increased risk of sexually transmitted diseases and the spread of a number of other dangerous infections.

The strength, depth and duration of love attachments vary from person to person. It shows up at a young age. But mature sexual love is closely connected with the general social and moral maturity of the individual. As A. S. Makarenko correctly wrote, human love “cannot be grown simply from the bowels of a simple zoological sexual desire. The powers of "amorous" love can only be found in the experience of non-sexual human sympathy. A young man will never love his bride and wife if he did not love his parents, comrades, friends. And the wider the area of ​​this non-sexual love, the nobler will be sexual love.

This determines the overall strategy of both family and school education. But parents, like teachers, need a clear understanding that in this

complex sphere of personal existence, far from everything depends on them. And above all, they need tact.

V. A. Sukhomlinsky said it well: “To protect the intimacy, the inviolability of the spiritual world of a teenager is one of the most important tasks of education. If someone outsider interferes literally in everything that a teenager thinks about, experiences, that he wants to protect from prying eyes, this dulls emotional sensitivity, coarsens the soul, brings up “thick-skinnedness”, which ultimately leads to emotional ignorance .. .

If you want a teenager to come to you for help, to open his soul to you, take care of precisely those corners of his soul, touching which is perceived painfully ... Respect for the personality of the pupil naturally leads to the expansion of the sphere of the personal, intimate, inviolable.

Schoolmates are better educators than parents, because they are ruthless.

André Maurois

Mankind cannot exist without communication

What are the psychological functions of peer society in youth?

Firstly, communication with peers is a very important specific channel of information ; according to it, teenagers and young men receive many necessary things that, for one reason or another, adults do not tell them. For example, a teenager receives most of the information on gender issues from peers, so their absence can delay his psychosexual development or make it unhealthy if there are no other sources of such information.

Secondly, it is a specific type of activity and interpersonal relationships. Group game, and then other types joint activities develop the necessary social interaction skills in the child , the ability to obey collective discipline and at the same time to defend their rights, to correlate personal interests with public ones. Outside the society of peers, where relationships are built fundamentally on an equal footing and status must be earned and be able to support, a child cannot develop the communicative qualities necessary for an adult.

The competitiveness of group relationships, which is not present in relationships with parents, also serves as a valuable life school. In the words of the French writer A. Morois, school mates are better educators than parents, because they are ruthless.

Thirdly, it is a specific kind of emotional contact. Consciousness of group belonging , solidarity, comradely mutual assistance not only makes it easier for the teenager to autonomize from adults, but also gives him an extremely important sense of emotional well-being and stability. Whether he managed to earn the respect and love of equals, comrades, is of decisive importance for youthful self-respect.

The increase in the influence of peers with age is manifested primarily in the fact that the amount of time spent by a high school student among peers increases compared to the time spent with parents.The norms and criteria adopted in the circle of peers become in some respects psychologically more significant than those that exist among the elders. Finally, there is a growing need for peer recognition and approval.

The school class is the most important group of belonging of a high school student

The student team, as the psychologist L. I. Novikova rightly noted (1973), is a dual phenomenon. On the one hand, this is a function of the pedagogical efforts of adults, as it is designed by adults and develops under their direct and indirect, direct or indirect influences. On the other hand, it is a spontaneously developing phenomenon, since children need communication and enter into communication not only according to the recipes established by adults.

This duality finds its expression in the dual structure of the team: formal, defined through a given organizational structure, system of business communication, a set of activities, and informal, emerging in the process of free communication of children.

Any school class is differentiated into groups and subgroups, moreover, according to different signs that do not coincide with each other.

In high school, the differentiation of interpersonal relationships becomes more noticeable than before. As the sociometric studies of Ya. L. Kolominsky (1976), A. V. Kirichuk (1970), Kh. isolated."

It is believed that the main reasons for differentiation are:

friend. Firstly , the existence of social stratification , which is especially noticeable in big cities and manifests itself both in the inequality of material opportunities (some teenagers have especially valuable, prestigious things that others do not have), and in the nature of life plans, the level of claims and ways to implement them. Sometimes these groups practically do not communicate with each other.

Secondly, a special intra-school and intra-class hierarchy is being formed, based on the official status of students, their academic performance or belonging to the “asset”.

Thirdly, there is a differentiation of authorities, statuses and prestige on the basis of unofficial values ​​accepted in the student environment itself. The criteria that determine the sociometric status of a high school student in a classroom team are diverse.

Whatever determines the status of a high school student in a team, it has a strong influence on his behavior and self-consciousness.An unfavorable position in the class team is one of the reasons for the premature departure of high school students from school. , and such young men often fall under the bad influence outside of school. Nine tenths of the surveyed offenders registered with the juvenile affairs inspectorates were in their school classes "isolated"; almost all of them were dissatisfied with their position in the class, many treated their classmates very negatively. About half of the juvenile delinquents surveyed were indifferent or hostile towards their classmates; among other schoolchildren, 19 percent showed such an attitude.

Obviously, there is also feedback. isolation difficult teenager in the class can be not only a cause, but also a consequence of the fact that he stands apart from the team,

Individual students also find teen clubs or interest groups outside of school. They can be very different: sports, artistic, etc., but the best of them capture the children as a whole, pushing both the family and the school. What is their advantage? Firstly, they are voluntary, secondly, they are of different ages, and thirdly, as a rule, they are headed by interesting adults, enthusiasts (others have nothing to do there). Whatever their official goal, the main thing for the guys is communication with each other, the personality of the leader and the warm, human atmosphere that they lack in school.

And if someone is bored at school, other centers of attraction appear. spontaneous groups.

In spontaneous groups, no matter how sharp their internal rivalry may be, only one who has real authority can be the leader.

Having discovered that the leaders in spontaneous groups are most often teenagers and young men who have not found use for their organizational skills at school, I. S. Polonsky studied, using sociometry, the situation of 30 informal leaders (having the highest status on their streets) in those classes where they are studying.

It turned out that among younger teenagers, there are still no sharp discrepancies between the position at school and on the street,

but by the VIII class there is, and in the IX-X classes, a trend of divergence of statuses is noticeably visible: the higher the status of a young man in a spontaneous group, the lower he is in the official class team. This gap in the status and evaluation criteria of school and out-of-school leaders creates a complex psychological and pedagogical problem.

Youth groups primarily satisfy the need for free communication unregulated by adults. Free communication is not just a way of spending leisure time, but also a means of self-expression, establishing new human contacts, from which something intimate, exclusively one's own, gradually crystallizes. Youthful communication at first is inevitably extensive, requiring frequent changes in situations and a fairly wide range of participants. Belonging to a company increases a teenager's self-confidence and provides additional opportunities for self-assertion.

In adolescents, the primary cells of communication are same-sex groups of boys and girls.

Then two such groups, without losing their internal community, form a mixed company.

Later, couples form within this company, which become more and more stable. , and the former big company breaks up or fades into the background. Of course, this scheme is not universal.

In the lives of men, the same-sex group means much more than in the lives of women. , attachment to it persists and is maintained even after the occurrence mixed company and the appearance of "his" girl. Along with the previously established microgroups and couples, the company may include individuals who do not have such contacts - belonging to the company as a whole is especially important for them. The expansion of the sphere of interaction between boys and girls can greatly reduce the duration of the first phases of development; then a heterogeneous company does not arise from the merger of twoautonomous same-sex groups, but almost immediately on an inter-individual basis.

Although different types of communication can coexist, performing different functions, their specific weight and significance change with age.Privileged meeting places are also changing . For teenagers, this is most often a yard or their own street.

High school students are reoriented to some key points in the center of the district or city , local "Broadway" or "hundred meters". Then, as the material resources grow and the companies themselves differentiate, the meetings are moved to some favorite public places.

Different forms and places of communication not only replace each other, but also coexist, responding to different psychological needs. "Hundred meters" allows people to see and show themselves in the most free environment, without a pre-conceived plan and material costs. The young man longs for new acquaintances, adventures, experiences. Inner restlessness drives him away from home, from the familiar, settled atmosphere. He is tormented by the expectation of something new, unexpected - right now, around the next corner, something significant should happen: an interesting meeting, an important acquaintance ... And although for the most part these expectations do not come true - you also need to be able to organize an adventure, all the same the next evening the legs take it there. And if school is boring, other centers of gravity appear.

.

If companies are formed mainly on the basis of joint entertainment, then human contacts in them, being emotionally significant, usually remainsuperficial. The quality of spending time together often leaves much to be desired.

The boy is the father of a man Kon Igor Semenovich

Pack or community?

Pack or community?

Schoolmates are better educators than parents, because they are ruthless.

André Maurois

In a young man, like in a bird, two instincts fight: one tells to live in a pack, the other - to retire with a female. However, the camaraderie for a long time overpowers.

François Mauriac

Judging by the data of history and anthropology, boys spend a significant part of their childhood without girls, in their own environment, and even where such communication is present, other boys are the main reference group for them. Homosociality is a universal trend of human development, and gender segregation is carried out not only and not so much by parents and educators, but by the children themselves, regardless of the instructions of adults and even contrary to them. Its evolutionary-biological prerequisites are well described by David Geary's theory, and its psychological prerequisites are well described by Eleanor Maccoby's theory of two cultures of childhood (see Chapter 2).

Here is what these processes look like according to developmental psychology (Maccoby, 1998; Ruble, Martin and Berenbaum, 2006).

Until two years of age, gender preferences in children are not yet particularly noticeable, although already 14-month-old children communicate more easily with siblings of the same sex. A clear play preference for peers of the same sex appears in the third year of life, first in girls, then in boys. By the age of 5, these preferences are already definitely established: children, especially boys, definitely prefer to play with children of the same sex and actively resist the efforts of parents and educators to force them to play with children of the opposite sex. This is manifested not only in specifically girlish (“mother-daughters”) and boyish (“Cossack-robbers”) games, but also in gender-neutral games.

With age, gender segregation increases. According to a longitudinal study by Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin (Maccoby and Jacklin, 1987), in 4.5-year-old children, same-sex games are three times more common than heterosexual ones, and at 6.5 years, their ratio looks like 11:1. Between the ages of 8 and 11, boys and girls play almost all the time separately from each other, and starting from the age of 4, this segregation is initiated and supported primarily by boys, condemning and ridiculing those children who violate these boundaries.

These trends are cross-cultural. Comparison of the social behavior of children 10 different cultures Africa, India, Philippines, Mexico and the USA showed that 3-6-year-olds spend two-thirds with children of the same sex, and 6-10-year-olds - three-quarters of the time they play (Whiting, Edwards, 1988). These are the results of comparing the communication of children in the USA, Switzerland and Ethiopia (Omark et al., 1973). In the Russian kindergarten 91% of children's selective contacts are with children of the same sex and only 9% with children of the opposite sex; 75% of all play associations and 91% of stable children's groups were same-sex (Repina, 1984). Little boys look at boys more often than at girls, and vice versa (Slobodskaya and Plyusnin, 1987).

Groups of girls and boys not only play separately, but can be at enmity with each other. The venues for their games and entertainment are often differentiated, special “girlish” and “boyish” places stand out, outwardly not marked in any way, but protected from outsiders and avoided by them. When boys and girls come together for a common game, a neutral place between two territories is often chosen (Osorina, 1999).

The psychological interpretation of the play segregation of boys and girls is ambiguous. Some authors believe that children instinctively strive for similarity - boys are drawn to boys, and girls to girls. Other psychologists, including Maccoby, see the reason that children's play styles are inherently different. Boys prefer power play and rough competition, in which girls inevitably feel disadvantaged, and girls' games, in turn, seem too sluggish and passive to boys. This encourages children to prefer play partners of their own gender, and these preferences are reinforced by rigid gender stereotypes.

Playful divergence and different communication styles contribute to the fact that boys and girls form different types primary and secondary groups. Boy groups seem to be more united, they adhere to the principle of gender segregation more strictly: “girls are not allowed to enter”. In all controversial issues, boys appeal exclusively to the opinions of other boys, emphatically ignoring girls. Boy groups are much more autonomous from adults than girl groups. They have a more stable group membership, with risky adventures and violation of adult rules serving as a means of cohesion and formation of group solidarity. Violation of "external" rules and at the same time strict obedience to the norms of one's own "We-group" is one of the most universal properties of masculinity.

However, the primary boyish groups are by no means monolithic. Their members are involved in group activities to varying degrees, some are central, others are on the periphery. On the basis of common position and interests, intragroup hierarchies and subgroups are formed. Raven Connell not without reason derived the concept of multiple masculinities by observing the life of boy groups. Different subgroups are closely related to the individual characteristics of boys. The most aggressive and adventurous boys are not particularly popular with the rest, but find their own kind and group accordingly. In girls, groupings are numerically smaller and the boundaries between them are less rigidly defined.

Boys communicate both within and between groups, so they develop multiple, intragroup and intergroup hierarchies. Each boy has an individual status in his subgroup, but his personal position in the macrogroup depends on the status of his subgroup. Boys' relationships at the Eton school, bursa, or cadet corps are not just functions of seniority or physical strength, but complex stratification systems that require the conceptual apparatus of sociology and social psychology to describe.

The same forms of behavior - the struggle for status, competitiveness, demonstrative and risky behavior - in different boy groups are expressed to varying degrees and may have different symbolic meanings. Some boys generally remain outside of groupings and group hierarchy, and this exclusion, exclusion or exclusion(these are different concepts: in the first case, the boy simply does not participate in the system, in the second he was excluded from it, in the third he left it himself) becomes decisive factor their individual development, contributing to the emergence of such diverse feelings as loneliness, isolation and self-sufficiency.

Gender differences are described not only in the language of group theory, but also in terms of the psychology of communication. Until recently, psychologists thought that boys interact more intensively with same-sex peers in groups than girls, while girls more often form dyadic (paired) relationships. The real picture turned out to be more complex: frequency dyadic interaction, little boys are not only not inferior to girls, but even ahead of them, but duration interactions with the same partner in 4-6-year-old girls are significantly greater than in boys of the same age (Benenson et al., 1997). And most importantly - girlish relationships are more intimate, suggest a higher degree of self-disclosure, discussion of common problems, etc. In other words, quantitative indicators hide subtle qualitative differences with a large number of individual variations.

A systematic analysis of the latest scientific literature on the characteristics of communication between boys and girls with peers (Rose, Rudolph, 2006) shows that girls are more likely than boys to be involved in prosocial (positive) interaction, lively conversation and self-disclosure; more often emphasize the importance of common goals associated with this relationship; more sensitive to the distress of their partner or partner and to the status of their relationship in the eyes of third parties; exposed to a wider range of stressors; seek support more often, express their emotions and discuss common problems; get more emotional support from their friends. On the contrary, boys, compared with girls, interact with each other more often as part of large play groups with clearly defined power hierarchies; more often participate in power fuss and competitive games; more likely to emphasize the importance of self-interest and dominance; more susceptible to direct physical and verbal victimization by peers; more likely to respond to stress with humor; receive less emotional support from their friends. Some of these features increase with age. Processes of the "female" type promote the development of more intimate relationships and inhibit antisocial behavior, but they can increase vulnerability to emotional difficulties. Male-type processes can hinder the development of intimate relationships and contribute to the emergence of behavioral problems, but improve the development of group relationships and protect against emotional difficulties. This is essential for the development of specific psychological and pedagogical strategies for working with children of different sexes.

The teenage boyish "group effect" also manifests itself in artistic perception. As the outstanding director Anatoly Efros subtly remarked, “adults sometimes cry in the theater. Teenagers almost never cry. He, a teenager, does not have the courage for an individual reaction, and he has already lost his childish innocence and the ability to "be himself". What will the friend next to you think? – this is what a teenager is constantly concerned about” (Efros, 1977). In the Leningrad Youth Theater, which was headed by 3. Ya. Korogodsky, they tried to avoid organized visits to the theater by whole classes, preferring a mixed, uneven-aged and unfamiliar audience. Children especially welcomed visiting the theater together with their parents. Joint viewing and discussion of the play not only deepen the aesthetic perception of the child, but also expand the range of joint emotional experiences, contributing to the rapprochement of children with their parents.

Of particular importance for boys is the feeling of group belonging, which actualizes the issue of gender differences in the degree of conformity and the ability to resist group pressure. In general terms, conformity is a change in the behavior or attitudes of an individual under the influence of real or imagined Others.

In the 1950s, the American psychologist Solomon Asch set up such an experiment. A group of students of seven to nine people were asked to estimate the length of three lines. The difference in the length of the segments shown was so significant that in the control experiments, when the subjects answered one by one, no one was mistaken. But the secret of the experiment was that the whole group, with the exception of the subject, was in collusion with the experimenter and gave pre-agreed wrong answers. How will the subject "naive subject" who has to answer last and who is pressured by the wrong, but unanimous opinion of the group, act? Will he believe his own eyes or the opinion of the majority? It was a matter of simple spatial perception, the divergence from the group did not affect any social or ideological values, and the group itself was artificial.

In the first series of Asch's experiments, 123 "naive subjects" made 12 judgments each, and 37% of the answers were incorrect, that is, they corresponded to the opinion of the majority. Strong individual variations were found, from the complete independence of some individuals to the complete subordination of others. After each experiment, Ash interviewed the subjects, all of whom said that the opinion of the majority was extremely important to them. When they discovered that their opinions differed from those of others, they questioned not the perception of the majority, but their own perception. Even the "independent subjects" who did not succumb to the pressure admitted that they felt uncomfortable. As one of them said, “despite everything, I had a secret fear that I didn’t understand something and might make a mistake, a fear of discovering some kind of inferiority. It is much more pleasant when you agree with others.

With some changes in methodology, Asch's experiments were repeated in the 1960s by the Leningrad psychologist A.P. Sopikov on several groups of children and adolescents in the Orlyonok camp. The results were similar, and it turned out that conformity decreases with age, but in girls it is on average 10% higher than in boys of the same age (from 7 to 18 years). However, it was not the girls who turned out to be the most conforming, but the boys from the brass bands, who were used to blowing in one tune: their performance literally went off scale.

Over the past half century, the theory and methods of studying conformity have become more complex, and gender differences have sharply decreased (Bond and Smith, 1996). In studies from the 1950s and 1960s, women of all ages appeared significantly more conformable and suggestible than men. The male researchers thought it was natural. More advanced studies have shown that these differences are statistically very small and depend on a number of situational conditions: the nature of the task, whether a man or a woman is conducting the experiment, and how close the conditions of the task are to men and women. The higher conformity of women can be explained not so much by their increased suggestibility and dependence on the group, but by gender-role expectations, which oblige a woman to strengthen social harmony and positive feelings between members of the group (Eagly, Chrvala, 1986). Thus, the emphasis is shifted from the supposed cognitive properties of "female thinking" to the peculiarities of the social group status of women and the nature of their occupations. Indeed, if we divide the objects, with judgments about which the subject must agree or disagree, into stereotypically masculine (cars, sports), stereotypically feminine (kitchen) and gender-neutral, then in the first case they are more conformal, ready to rely on someone else's opinion , there will be women, in the second - men, and in the third case there will be no gender differences.

For our topic, the degree of ability of boys and girls to resist group pressure is especially important. Professional psychology, like everyday consciousness, has two opposite opinions on this. On the one hand, it is generally accepted that girls are more conformable and suggestible than boys. On the other hand, everyone knows that boys are much more gregarious creatures, ready to do many things for the company that they would never do alone, especially if these risky and anti-normative actions correspond to the canon of hegemonic masculinity. A study of 3,600 men and women aged 10 to 30 from various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds found that the ability to resist peer pressure increases the most between 14 and 18 years of age, with girls more so than boys. Although girls are more concerned about the opinions of the people around them than boys, their social and psychological connection with the peer group is weaker, which allows them to maintain a greater degree of autonomy from the group, diverge from it and make independent decisions that more herd boys do not dare (Steinberg, Monahan , 2007). However, the study was not longitudinal, so this is more a statement of the question than an answer to it.

No matter how wild and unruly the boyish group may look from the outside, this is not just a flock, but a complex community, with its own social structure and power vertical. These properties are most clearly manifested where the general, generic properties of the male subculture are enhanced by institutional closure, for example, in closed educational and correctional institutions. In the 1980s, the well-known Moscow social psychologist M. Yu. Kondratiev studied several such institutions. Here is what a theoretical summary of his research looks like (although it is written in professional scientific language, a thinking reader can understand it without a special dictionary).

Social psychology of closed educational institutions. Material for thought

First of all, we will try to describe in the form of a block of consistent ascertaining conclusions a set of socio-psychological patterns that reveal the general scheme according to which interpersonal relations of adolescents with peers are built in any closed educational institutions, and allow us to consider the entire set of such communities as an independent and original object of social psychological research.

1. The external, institutionally set closeness of boarding schools inevitably gives rise to the internal, actually psychological closeness of the groups of adolescents brought up in them, "launching" the mechanism of a rigidly stereotyped perception of the world around the developing personality from the standpoint of the confrontational dichotomy "we - they", "us - others".

2. In closed teenage communities, one of the spheres of intragroup activity plays a dominant role: success in it has a paramount personal value for all members of the group without exception, it is precisely its goals and objectives that decisively mediate the interpersonal relations of adolescents, it is its norms and values ​​that set the character informal intragroup structure, it is its content and form that determine the secondary importance of other spheres of life. Without a specially organized pedagogical influence aimed at creating a multi-activity foundation for interpersonal relations in closed communities, they spontaneously take shape and develop as corporate groups with pronounced mono-activity.

3. The dominance of monoactivity in adolescent groups in closed institutions determines the specific course of group formation processes in general and, in particular, intragroup structuring, inevitably turning these communities into monostructured groupings. At the same time, in all these adolescent communities, a single version of the monostructure is being formed, the distinguishing feature of which is not the direct coincidence of all universally significant intragroup structures, but their rigid correlation - the informal structure of power, which is derived from the activity dominant in this community, determines almost all the characteristics of other universally significant structures, including including such as the referentometric structure and the structure of emotional relationships.

4. The monostructure of groups of pupils of closed institutions has a peculiar stratification, to a certain extent "caste" character. The real status position of a particular teenager in such a community, in fact, is exhaustively determined by the factor of his belonging to a certain status stratum in the intragroup informal power structure. Differences in the rights and obligations of adolescents belonging to the same intra-group stratum are not of a qualitative nature, while the positions in the group of representatives of any two different strata do not fundamentally coincide. Climbing the stratification ladder for each pupil is hampered by the resistance of the higher status layer and the rigidity of interstratification boundaries; “downward” mobility is facilitated by a fierce competition for power within each of the intragroup strata and by the interest of representatives of the lower status stratum in the appearance of “vacant” places in the higher stratum.

5. The presence in the types of adolescent communities under consideration of relatively isolated from each other intragroup strata reflects the fact that the internal, actually psychological closeness of these groups from society, largely generated by their external, institutionally set closeness, at a certain stage acquires a pronounced intragroup character, in to a certain extent violating the integrity of these communities themselves. In other words, as a rule, the opposition “we – they”, “us – foe”, which is determined by the very uniqueness of the social situation of the development of these adolescents by the very uniqueness of the social situation of the development of these adolescents, is clearly perceived and often painfully experienced by pupils, the opposition “we – they”, “ours – others”, tends to deepen and naturally acquires an intragroup meaning. The further development of this process leads to the fact that the ever-deepening opposition "we - they" due to the consistent narrowing of the "we" pole develops into a tough confrontation built according to the formula of militant individualism "I - they", i.e., in fact, , serves to form a closed personality.

6. Intra-group stratification in closed adolescent communities, which is reflected in the rank-dispositional nature of the intra-group informal power structure, decisively influences in general the specifics of significance relations between pupils and, in particular, the features of the “significant other” model, which are most typical for these data. groups. In teenage communities closed educational institutions The decisive basis for the subjective significance of the pupil for a peer is the superiority of his role, power position in the informal structure of the community.

In such stratified groups, this is manifested, in particular, in the fact that:

a) for a teenage pupil, a representative of a higher status layer always acts as a “significant other”, the advantage of whose role position is unconditionally recognized, whose opinion is taken into account, but whose image in the vast majority of cases is negatively colored<…>;

b) for a high-status pupil, his low-status group comrade is often not perceived at all as a person endowed with individual characteristics and capable of an independent act, but is considered only as a representative of a lower intra-group stratum (the effect of "descending blindness"); the role position of such a teenager is recognized by a high-status pupil as frankly weak and vulnerable, his opinion is not taken into account, and the image is negatively colored ... not so much because of some personal shortcomings, but in connection with the very fact of belonging to the category of low-status. Thus, in adolescent groups of closed institutions, the presence of a rigid informal monostructure of a stratification nature creates a situation in which the role significance of high-status people is transferred to the sphere of referential relations (“irradiation of power”), and the role infringement of low-status ones becomes the cause of their depersonalization (“irradiation of anarchy”) .

7. Pupils of closed institutions of different status assess the psychological atmosphere prevailing in groups in fundamentally different ways - high-status members of the community, as a rule, are generally satisfied with the prevailing psychological climate in the group, and low-status adolescents qualify the psychological atmosphere in the community as clearly unfavorable. At the same time, outsiders often experience an even more acute reluctance than the official leaders of such closed groups to change the group of their membership ... At the same time, a certain dissatisfaction of unofficial leaders with the current state of affairs in these communities, in fact, provided the zone of proximal development of the group.

Thus, such the most important intragroup processes, how formation of an informal intragroup structure adolescent communities and the development of relations of significance of their members are carried out according to qualitatively similar scenarios in various closed institutions.

At the same time, the noted socio-psychological proximity, in fact, the affinity of the groups of pupils of all types of boarding schools in no way means that there are no substantial differences between them. Moreover, there is every reason to believe that adolescent communities in each of the three types of closed educational institutions under consideration have their own socio-psychological specificity, inherent only to this class of groups.

So, let's try to conduct a brief comparative analysis of the features of intragroup structuring and significance relations in groups of pupils from different closed educational institutions.

The peculiarity of the intragroup structure of closed adolescent communities and the specificity of the correlation of the determining grounds for the subjective significance for each other of the pupils of each of the three types of residential institutions is to a decisive extent determined by the degree of closeness of this type of institutions and the peculiarities of the content of the activity that plays here a group- and personality-forming role, acting as the main principle mediating the interpersonal relations of adolescents. In a conditional continuum " open group- closed group" adolescent communities of the considered types of closed educational institutions can be arranged in ascending order of both external, "regime", and internal, actually psychological closeness in the following sequence: "a group of pupils of a professionally specialized boarding school" - "a group of pupils orphanage or a boarding school” – “a group of juvenile delinquents in conditions of forced isolation”. In all the closed communities listed above, the "communal" activity of adolescents most significantly affects the nature of their interpersonal relationships. At the same time, in the conditions of a colony, a special vocational school, a special school for those who are difficult to educate, communication in its content essence and semantic load turns into a proper objective activity ... (Kondratiev, 2005, pp. 170–173).

M. Yu. Kondratiev clearly captures the socio-psychological patterns of male (boyish) group behavior, which we have already encountered when discussing the problems of school history, although in open educational institutions everything looks much softer. Now it is clear to us that these features stem not so much from the immanent properties of "masculinity" as from the socio-structural characteristics of the respective socio-pedagogical institutions. We will need this information when discussing the problems of school violence.

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"School mates are better educators than parents, because they are ruthless."
Andre Maurois. "Letters to a Stranger".

The concern of many parents is the fact that their children behave differently in school, outside of it and at home. They are quiet at school, teachers may even speak well of them, but returning home from the street, they come with a black eye. At home, they are sometimes naughty and secretive. So, let's try to figure out why the behavior of a teenager is so strikingly different.
First of all, remember how you behave at work and at home, with friends, with your boss? Are you always the same? No. You perform certain social roles: at home the role of a wife (husband) and parent, at work the role of a subordinate or boss - this is natural, as it brings a certain order into relationships. Adolescents have their own set of social roles, between which they switch as needed. But it is sometimes very difficult for a teenager to fulfill his roles, because he is faced with such a need for the first time. In the school class, he performs one role (which sometimes he may not like), at home - another, namely a child. But he feels himself no longer a child at all and wants his opinion to be taken into account, and hence conflicts. In the end, he finds a role suitable for him, the role of a full member of the collective on the street among his peers.
But first things first. The school class is a dual phenomenon in that there is a formal representation of it and its structure by teachers (that is, how they see it), and there is an informal image of the class with its leaders, groups and subgroups. What group can our teenager fall into? The signs by which class stratification occurs can be very different. On the basis of social inequality: it can be financial situation, and the different nature of life plans, the level of claims for benefits and methods of implementation (which, as we know, can be very different). There is also a special hierarchy based on the official status of students, their academic performance (moreover, there is almost always a confrontation between "nerds" and "loafers", although they can periodically resort to each other's help). Finally, there is a differentiation of authorities, statuses and prestige on the basis of unofficial values ​​accepted in the student environment itself. Very often this difference in physical strength, impudently outrageous behavior with teachers, success in communicating with girls (boys), moral and volitional qualities are also taken into account.
The problem of role-playing behavior lies in the fact that if you have taken on a certain role, or you have been given it, then you must always follow it in all situations, this is expected and even required from you. It is clear that in any team, one way or another, the roles of “jesters”, “sixes”, “outcasts” will be formed, few people can like such roles. Usually, the social roles of the school (meaning informal relations) are also transferred to the street distribution of roles, of course, if the street company is represented by practically the same classmates.
A teenager, not wanting to put up with his role, will first of all seek support from his parents, provided that they have previously established themselves as reliable partners, and not authoritarian "tyrants" or liberal connivances (who practically had little interest in the life and aspirations of their child). If there is no trust in parents, then the teenager will have to fight on two fronts: at school and at home. Moreover, one should expect the anger of a teenager in connection with this in relation to his parents, and this anger will be global and all-consuming. Here is an example from a letter from a ninth grader.
“Life is arranged so badly that out of millions of people on Earth, you must meet only one beloved woman and only one a true friend. Why? Why? It's you grown-ups who did it! I want many people, 20 or 50 people around me to be real, close and loved, so that we are not afraid of each other and are wide open. But no, even my peers huddle.”
Who can like the roles imposed, not satisfying internal needs? Nobody.
But there is always a way out. After all, there are groups that are formed according to interests: you can find friends there, where a teenager can take a worthy position. As proof, I will say that the number of various Internet portals and visitors to them is increasing every day, and what is this if not a search for a social circle of interests! But I'm still for live communication. Since there is direct contact in living groups, the leader is an adult who has a charismatic influence on all members of the group and guides them. It can be various circles, sports, art sections. You just need to get a good feel for your child, his desires, needs, find a trusting style of communication and help him win the social roles that he needs.
It was not for nothing that I titled the article “Beware, children!”. On the one hand, we should not be afraid of children, not deny them, and on the other, remember that teenage years- a very important stage in the life of any person, and not just the transition from childhood to adulthood, a person has one life, but part of it is entrusted to previous generations for the purpose of continuity.
How many biographies do we know?
painting serene, calm,
continuous development of the individual?
Our life, like that whole, is composed
of which we are a part
in an incomprehensible way
out of freedom and necessity. Our will is
a foreshadowing of what we will do at
any circumstances. But these same circumstances
take over us in their own way. "What" - we define,
"how" - rarely depends on us, about "why" we do not
we dare to inquire, and from that it is fair to us
indicate "quia" ("because")".
I.-V. Goethe. From my life.